Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Marqeta is on a mission to change the way money moves, and they are seeking an experienced Senior Manager, Platform Engineering to lead their infrastructure software engineering team. This role involves driving platform modernization, cost optimization, and operational excellence while managing a team responsible for the Kubernetes-based compute platform that supports millions of payment transactions.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of infrastructure software engineers focused on Kubernetes platform engineering
• Build a culture of innovation, operational excellence, and customer-focused platform development
• Recruit top talent and develop career growth paths for team members
• Foster collaboration with application development teams, SRE, security, and other infrastructure teams
• Drive technical decision-making while empowering engineers to own their solutions
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for Marqeta's Kubernetes compute platform
• Drive continuous platform modernization to support evolving business needs and scale requirements
• Champion platform-as-a-product mindset, treating internal engineering teams as customers
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies and AWS services to improve platform capabilities
• Lead architectural decisions for container orchestration, service mesh, observability, and developer tooling
• Develop and implement strategies to optimize Kubernetes infrastructure costs without compromising performance or reliability
• Monitor and analyze compute resource utilization, identifying opportunities for right-sizing and efficiency gains
• Implement FinOps practices including chargeback/showback models, budget alerting, and cost allocation
• Drive adoption of cost-effective AWS services and spot instances where appropriate
• Partner with engineering teams to optimize application resource requests and limits
• Ensure ultra-high availability of the production Kubernetes platform supporting payment processing workloads
• Establish SLOs/SLIs for platform reliability and performance
• Lead incident response for platform-level issues and drive continuous improvement through blameless postmortems
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions
• Balance innovation with stability through disciplined change management and deployment practices
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation for platform infrastructure
• Apply software development best practices to infrastructure code (testing, code review, version control)
• Drive infrastructure-as-code initiatives using Terraform and other automation tools
• Collaborate with security teams to embed security into the platform and SDLC
• Enable developer productivity through self-service capabilities and golden paths

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles
• 5+ years of people management experience, leading technical teams through complex initiatives
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments at scale (architecture, operations, troubleshooting)
• Extensive Cloud fundamental knowledge (AWS preferred, including EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, and other core services)
• Proven track record of Kubernetes cost optimization and resource efficiency improvements
• Strong understanding of SDLC methodologies, CI/CD practices, and infrastructure-as-code
• Experience managing ultra-high availability systems (99.99%+ uptime) in production
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Hands-on experience with container technologies, service mesh, and cloud-native architectures
• Strong technical leadership skills with ability to influence without authority across the organization
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience in payments, financial services, or other highly regulated industries
• Familiarity with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and compliance requirements in cloud environments
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or Security Specialty)
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, AWS App Mesh)
• Background with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)
• Knowledge of GitOps practices and tools (ArgoCD, Flux)
• Experience with multi-tenancy and platform security patterns
• Familiarity with FinOps frameworks and cloud cost management tools